With data center modernization strategies in place and underway, IT leaders are turning their focus to automation and process improvements that ensure reliable, high-quality, and secure data. Data is at the core of everything that VMware customers do. Data is the lifeblood of the modern enterprise, and their success is increasingly determined by the ability to extract value from it.
Significant growth in database instances and types – triggered by app modernization – is driving a need for infrastructure powered by automation and modernized practices. VMware customers manage an increasing number of database types and instances. The customer requirements start with relational databases but also expand to in-memory databases, data warehouses, key-value stores, streaming and messaging systems, and more—what we call “core data services.”
As the data center continues to evolve and expand, so does VMware’s approach to executing on our vision of accelerated innovation through virtualization and cloud technologies. VMware is constantly growing its portfolio with software and integrations aimed at solving a pressing problem for our customers – how to manage a proliferating database estate, while supporting the agility and cloud-native consumption model required by application developers.
Breakdown Silos and Cut Through Cloud Chaos
To stay ahead of the curve in a rapidly evolving and competitive market, business leaders are putting a stronger emphasis on speed-to-market for the digital solutions that support the business. The developers creating the applications need quick and simple access to infrastructure to support these demands, and they want the flexibility to choose from multiple clouds to differentiate the solutions they’re building.
To address the needs of the IT end-user, these data-driven applications and sprawling databases end up on varying types of infrastructure with inconsistent policies for security, data protection, and governance. This inevitably leads to physical and operational silos that break down the ability to operate with the agility needed to meet the business demands, while also creating complex compliance risk – a challenge VMware refers to as Cloud Chaos.
For organization still in the early phases of their modernization journey, the way they provision infrastructure has not evolved enough to meet the needs of the business. Consumers of IT infrastructure are stuck in legacy processes, with large amounts of operational databases managed and provisioned through traditional methods like ticket systems that need to be executed on by specialized teams.
Better Together: vSAN and Data Services Manager
Following up on our introductory article last week: What is DBaaS (Past, Present, Future), we are now looking at how our customers can get the best of vSAN and Data Services Manager:
vSAN is VMware’s Hyperconverged Infrastructure (HCI) solution, and the first step for many organizations looking to adopt a multi-cloud strategy and avoid the dreaded Cloud Chaos. Providing a common operational model for managing compute and storage by abstracting the underlying infrastructure, HCI extends beyond the core data center to the edge and the public cloud.
HCI also solves for much of the operational pain experienced by DevOps. Using easy-to-follow workflows and a high degree of automation, vSAN can dynamically match requirements with underlying storage resources. What once took weeks to be addressed by specialist teams can now be delivered in less than a day through software and a dynamic team.
To further solve for Cloud Chaos and empower IT admins, DBA developer teams, and their business decision makers to achieve the full benefits of their HCI infrastructure, vSAN directly integrates with VMware Data Services Manager. With Data Services Manager, enterprises and cloud service providers alike can run rich databases on HCI with self-service provisioning and automated database lifecycle management capabilities—choosing MySQL, PostgreSQL, or Microsoft SQL Server.
Developers gain the self-service capabilities and APIs needed to deliver apps with high velocity to meet business objectives, while IT admins and DBAs retain the governance required to manage databases at scale.
Level-up Your Data Center Operations
Running VMware Data Services Manager on vSAN offers organizations of all sizes a host of compelling benefits including:
Faster provisioning options for database platforms – Open-source database templates that are pre-packaged and certified by VMware enable organizations to quickly spin up database instances.
Automated operations – Common rote tasks like security patches, version upgrades, and certificate management can all be automated. IT operators focus on managing underlying infrastructure, while data teams take care of pathing, updates, read replicas, template management, and failover.
Extensive monitoring – Gain visibility into both database and underlying local and cloud resources, including metrics such as the utilization of CPU, memory, network, local, and cloud storage, as well as curated alarms and notifications for improved visibility into the health of both the database and the underlying infrastructure.
Enterprise-grade object storage – Leverage vSAN shared-nothing architecture for object storage to improve storage efficiency and address multiple new use case needs for object storage.
Maximum flexibility and future-proof HCI – Manage compute and storage resources on a single platform by combining vSphere with integrated HCI powered by vSAN.
Take a look at a recent article we published to learn more about the business value, key results, and best practices when running VMware Data Services on vSAN.
Interested in Learning More?
Check out the Data Services Manager solution brief and the Data Services Manager Hands-On-Lab.
Explore the benefits of HCI powered by VMware vSAN.
Learn about the performance boosts you can expect from vSAN ESA.
